@phoenixdave... I find that product quality has improved significantly. Most CE products are manufactured overseas. I also find that most successful companies choose to have their own manufacturing facilities to control quality. The bigger problem is protecting the IP.

@Charlotte... The anti-outsourcing side seems to be focusing on the diminished quality of the final product as a primary business reason to not outsource. As one who obviously has first-hand knowledge, I was wondering what your experiences have been.

As a Founder of a small manufacturing company in consumer electronics, and making the choice to outsource manufacturing overseas, there are several business tradeoffs a company must evaluate. My choice to outsource overseas was driven by total cost of ownership, and I compared the cost of making the CE product in the USA or in China. Hands down it's cheaper in China, mostly due to the lower labor costs...and shipping costs are very low/unit in a container. It made the timeline of working capital (money to float the inventory) harder and more expensive. Now my point about processor selection...the China manufacturer selected a mainstream processor (bulk pricing), and did all of the NRE/Engineering at no cost to the company. US manufacturers have become "Brand Managers", so the Intel strategy needs to seed the opportunity overseas. ARM is strongly embedded in video markets and more, and to replace the ARM with an Intel processor, it will require a leap frog in technology approach, with some help with software conversions (due to the change in processors). Backward compatibility is always a concern as well.

Does anyone else notice that none of the new netbook pads are directly competing with the iPad? Just about all of the are convertables which makes them thicker, heavier and realistically more expensive to make.
When is anybody in the netbook business going to realize that a really big part of the iPads success is the form factor? Deviate from that and you don't really have a competitor. In that past win tablets in slate format were aimed at vertical markets (UPS, medical ect.) and were priced accordingly. I would love to be able to buy an iPad that runs Win7. I have no interest in a convertable netbook that is bulkier and heavier than an iPad, nor am I interested in a $2000 slate winpad.
Rather than a convertable tablet why not just use a bluetooth keypad/mouse for desktop applications and let the winpad be a real iPad competitor.

1. Tablet sales also cannibalize Apple Mac sales as well so things are not as rosy for Steve Job. Apple certainly makes more money with Mac Sales than Tablet.
2. Intel had the most sophisticated processor technologies and manufacture capability that no other companies can compete. Except maybe one contender is Samsung (but Samsung is not a leader in design chip)
3. For the tablet market, it is not Intel alone going after this market. Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and everyone in the universe going after this new segment. Apple will always get the top tier buyers but the mass belong to the rest of the industry (Just like the Mac).
4. The Itanic comments are just nonsense.

Fully agree.
The fact that a single product sells more than 10% of the overall Notebook sales looks to me no "over-hype" at all. Apple has no technology to compete with Intel on microprocessors, BUT Apple strength is on the applications' side. There is no competition on PC market (look at McIntosh sales). INTEL can eventually go to the tablet market by ATOM, but they need Android and competitive applications offer. That could result in "everybody should use Atom and everybody should use Android" like it was for Intel-Microsoft in PC era. APPLE advantage ? They will stay focused on a single product to optimize the hardware and the software and keep the advantage in terms of SERVICES and innovation, no matter the processor. S.Jobs has been oversmarted once, difficult that it will happen again.

I'd expect that 8mln iPads generated revenue comparable much greater than of 8mln note/netbooks so it is not so insignificant.
IMO, nowadays, the processor architecture does not matter too much, as long as the one's OS can be ported to it and the minimum performance requirements are met. Then the most important factors are the price, marketing and the connections.
Eg. now I use MIPS on RMI for multimedia on CE and feel no difference to ARM I used in the past.

Seems to me that the ARM market has become so competitive with so many silicon houses endorsing and producing excellent ARM SoC that to commit a product to the Atom would be very much commuting a product design to Intel's arm's length (no pun intended) implied control. Granted ARM is licensed as the Atom could be (or maybe is). However, take take the x86/AMD second source relationship as an example. Intel attempted to real in control of the x86 when AMD became successful. What will Intel do should they license the Atom to an SoC house and that SoC house become highly competitive with Intel? I believe the strategy at Intel is to be the only supplier of Atom or at least the dominant once with strings attached.
As far as being accustomed to seeing a laundry list of integration on Intel silicon, what did you see with the StrongARM. That was a disaster.

Thanks. I was never a fan of AMD, but AMD clearly out foxed Intel. I think ARM is still better than the Atom and apparently the embedded market agrees. I followed the development of the Itantic from the early days of the HP/Intel partnership and recognized it as a clear mistake; It was a major departure from Intel's historical past practice of backward compatibility. If you really want a history of the Itantic, see Bob Cowell's "The Pentium Chronicles" book and/or search for Bob's lecture to the Stanford Computer EE?? Architecture class (originally mentioned on the www.theinquirer.net). Bob was the lead on the IA32 team. Bob , as the story goes, was driven out of Intel by Intel management when he tried to stress the importance of developing the 64-bit x86 in parallel with the IA64. Intel's "we can't loose" management philosophy was very much akin to NASA's Challenger team in the early 2000's.

Itantic is correct, thank you very much. If you followed the rise and fall of the Itanium processor verses the AMD 64 development, you will clearly understand the meaning of Itantic. Some would say it nearly sank the Intel ship.